Last week, LMA 2025 in Washington, D.C., was jam-packed with phenomenal sessions and speakers. I was lucky enough to tune into a session, moderated by Tara Weintritt (Partner at Wicker Park Group), featuring Dan Pulka (CMBDO at Troutman Pepper Locke) and Michelle Lang (Director of Client Experience at McDermott Will & Emery), as they talked about what it means to empower growth and iteration in the firm through client feedback programs.

It was an incredibly popular session that dove into the gift of giving and receiving feedback. Tara kicked off the session with a story about Iris Apfel, a fearless American fashion icon and business executive, who signed a modeling contract at the age of 97. She believed that creative ideas are constantly surrounding us in our journey to success.

To wrap things up, a breakout session focused on an IDS exercise (identify, discuss, and solve) for us to network and take home new ideas for our programs. These are the tips that Michelle and Dan discussed from their client feedback program strategies.

Michelle offered her expertise on what worked well in the implementation stages at McDermott by discussing their “Always Better” motto:

• Client feedback programs should always be approached as a slow and steady plan for growth in the long term.
• Start small and then scale. Start slow with the building blocks, scale, and then target the client's experience. This makes the program seamless when it is time to target the clients who are the top priority.
• Interview the advocates. By making it an initiative to start with the clients who are the greatest advocates, it makes that transition into the process that much easier when you branch out for other types of feedback.

Following that, Dan had advice about a firm-wide buy-in with their motto “Easy to use, Hard to Ignore Approach” at Troutman and Pepper:

• Get client feedback on everything. This builds trust and rapport over time with all the new happenings at the firm, like a new website or merger. It is important to be transparent with your clients on every piece of news, whether it is glamorous or not so glamorous.
• Simplicity. Keep the client program automated and transformational for the attorneys. It should be an easy interaction for both the client and the attorney to adopt. 
• Value-based conversations.  Tie your conversations back to the key areas that you want to be known for.

By building a solid foundation for how you would like to scale your feedback and setting benchmarks for success, you will get a program that infuses insights from clients into the overall business plans.

More is more, and less is a bore.

-Iris Apfel